The venture capital arm of America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said it aims to direct its funds into real-world asset trading, decentralized finance and artificial intelligence next year.
Coinbase Ventures said in a blog post that it is actively seeking investments in teams involved in advances in asset tokenization, specialized exchanges and trading terminals, next-generation DeFi, and agent AI.
“These are the categories where we believe the next big breakout companies and protocols will emerge, and these are the categories we are actively looking to invest in,” the firm wrote.
According to PitchBook, Coinbase Ventures has made 618 investments since 2018 and has a portfolio of 422 startups. Most recently, it invested in DeFi compliance platform 0xbow on November 18th, and in October, it invested in payment infrastructure companies Zynk and ZAR, and prediction market platform Kalshi.
Coinbase Ventures’ Kinji Steimetz said in a thread on X that he expects to see new forms of exposure to real-world assets, such as perpetual futures contracts, which will “create aggregate exposure to off-chain assets.”
He also highlighted the rise of ‘prop AMMs’ (proprietary automated market makers), a new exchange design that protects liquidity providers from abuse by sophisticated traders and bots.
Jonathan King, an investor at Coinbase Ventures, predicts the emergence of prediction market aggregators, saying, “We expect this to emerge as the dominant interface layer, consolidating $600 million in fragmented liquidity and providing a unified view of real-time event odds across venues.”
Current forecast market statistics for Kalshi and Polymarket. sauce: DeFi rate
Next generation DeFi coming in 2026
Ethan Oak, an investor at Coinbase Ventures, said that integrating perpetual futures exchanges with other DeFi protocols, such as lending, allows traders to earn yield on collateral while maintaining leveraged positions, creating new capital efficiencies.
Oak also observed a “surge in developer energy” focused on privacy-preserving assets such as Zcash (ZEC), and also predicted growth in on-chain privacy-preserving tools.
Related: DeFi is already 30% of the way to mass adoption: Chainlink founder
Meanwhile, King witnessed the emergence of DeFi protocols that blend on-chain reputation with off-chain data to enable unsecured borrowing at scale. “The market opportunity is huge,” he says.
“The United States alone has $1.3 trillion in unsecured revolving credit facilities, and cryptocurrencies can access it through superior capital efficiency and global accessibility.”
DeFi TVL is down 33% from its all-time high in 2021. sauce: Defilama
Growth expected in Agentic AI, DePIN, and “Proof of Humanity”
The last three innovations were in the field of AI. There is a gap in the training of robots and bodily AI systems, and “available datasets remain limited and fragmented,” Steimetz said.
Distributed Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) have the potential to provide a viable framework for expanding the collection of high-quality physical interaction data for robotics.
Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, said “Proof of Humanity” solutions that combine biometrics, cryptographic signatures and open standards to verify human-generated and AI-generated content will be a growth area in 2026.
Finally, there will be AI agent tools that allow non-technical founders to quickly launch on-chain businesses. “In 2026, we may see even more democratization of on-chain construction with AI agents,” King said, adding that code generation, security auditing, and continuous monitoring of smart contracts will also be handled.
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